Ecocide and genocide have historical connection

Sunday, April 20 is the anniversary of the birth of Adolf Hitler. It should be a day of remembrance for the 10 million-plus victims of the Holocaust. On April 20, 1943, Jews, Poles, Slovaks, Roma and gays disembarked a train at Auschwitz and stood in line for Mengele's "selections." On that day alone, hundreds of thousands more met the same horrible fate at Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno and Sobibor. Gassed, shot and buried in mass graves.

April 20, 1943 was a day of genocide. But will April 20, 2008 be any different? Not for the people of Darfur, Sudan. Some argue whether or not that what is happening in the Sudan is genocide, but as we sit and debate about this issue, the militias bathe in blood. According to Amnesty International, hundreds of thousands of Darfurians have been murdered, countless women and children raped, their crops and homes destroyed and over two million have been displaced. Although world leaders swore "Never Again" after the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans in 1994, Janjaweed militias and Sudanese soldiers have been murdering and raping unarmed Darfurians for five years with impunity.

According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the term "genocide" was first used in 1944 by a Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin to describe the Nazis' "Final Solution." Lemkin defined genocide as "a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves." The coordinated military assaults of the Sudanese government on the people of Darfur fit Lemkin's definition exactly.

As Lemkin said, genocide seeks to destroy the foundations of life. It is a war against existence. Such a war is going on right now, but it is much larger than the Darfur conflict. It is the human race's war against the planet! We are killing entire species of animals. We are polluting our rivers and oceans with poisons and chemicals. We are clearcutting massive forests and dumping radioactive waste that will last several generations. This is ecocide!

There is a direct connection between ecocide and genocide. Ecocide is causing climate change, and climate change has played a major role in the genocide in Darfur. In a 2007 Washington Post editorial, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon wrote, "The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change." As Secretary Ban Ki-moon explained, "Two decades ago, the rains in southern Sudan began to fail." According to U.N. statistics, average precipitation has declined some 40 percent since the early 1980s. Scientists at first considered this to be an unfortunate quirk of nature. But subsequent investigation found that it coincided with a rise in temperatures of the Indian Ocean, disrupting seasonal monsoons. This suggests that the drying of sub-Saharan Africa derives, to some degree, from man-made global warming. It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought."

There are also historical connections between ecocide and genocide. One of the most alarming of man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, river and seas with lethal chemicals used to kill insects, weeds and other "pests." According to Rachael Carson, author of "Silent Spring," the production of synthetic pesticides in the United States increased more than fivefold between 1947 and 1960. This increase was the result of the development of the synthetic-chemical industry. "This industry," Carson wrote, "is a child of the Second World War. In the course of developing agents of chemical warfare, some of the chemicals created in the laboratory were found to be lethal to insects." According to biologist Sandra Steingraber, two widely used pesticides, Parathion and Malathion, were first used by Nazis. "Parathion and Malathion-belong to a group of synthetic chemicals called organophosphates," Steingraber wrote. "Developed by a German company as a nerve gas, members of the first generation of organophosphate poisons were tested on prisoners in the concentration camps of Auschwitz." Thus, the same chemicals used by the Nazis to carry out the Holocaust were eventually used on our environment.

This is no coincidence. Ecocide and genocide are intrinsically connected-both are systematic assaults on the essential foundations of the life. This Earth Day (April 22), we should all meditate on the interconnection of humanity and nature and think about what we can do to restore equilibrium to our currently unsustainable civilization.

John Leschak is a first-year law student. You may e-mail him at jlesch2@pride.hofstra.edu.